


Eleventh Day of Christmas - The Big Heist

by unjaundiced



Series: Holiday Headaches [11]
Category: Naruto
Genre: 12 Days of Christmas, 12 Days of Fic, Evasion Tactics, Gen, Gender Confusion, Hiding in Closets, Humor, M/M, Ninjas Ruin Everything, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 22:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5643940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unjaundiced/pseuds/unjaundiced
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakashi and Iruka dodge, well, everyone and plan the ultimate distraction—a surprise fukubukuro sale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eleventh Day of Christmas - The Big Heist

Iruka breathed hard, fingers of one hand tight on the wrist of the hand pressed over his mouth, fingers of the other digging into the arm wrapped around his waist. He strained against the unwelcome embrace, heart racing as he did his best to gnaw through the leather of the glove to reach sensitive flesh. The heel of his foot dug into the insole of his captor's foot and his captor wrapped a leg around the offending appendage, further keeping him off balance. He huffed and changed tactics, reaching back to feel for the soft fluffy bush of hair behind him. His fingers curled into the hair and pulled.  
  
His captor grunted, mumbling in his ear as a hot rush. “Stop it, Iruka-sensei. The enemy is  _still_ out there.”  
  
Iruka rolled his eyes at Kakashi's melodrama, sucking in a stifled breath of surprise as the jounin sank back against the wall of the closet and folded over him. He flailed weakly, pinned on all sides and feeling entirely overwhelmed as Kakashi pressed his chin to his shoulder and mumbled a warning to stop moving so much. A series of thumps had them freezing as the closet door swung open.  
  
“See? Nothing in here. We already check this one,” came Sasuke's deadpan voice.  
  
“I'm telling you, I _heard_ something,” came Naruto's insistent cry.  
  
“Dammit, why are Kakashi-sensei and Iruka-sensei so good at hide-and-seek anyhow,” Sakura chimed in. Both teachers could almost hear the girl's dark side pounding them to a bloody pulp in her head. Iruka limply curled into himself. If they were spotted now, it would be better for Kakashi to be the bigger target.  
  
“Let's look somewhere else,” Sasuke said, swinging the door shut.  
  
“Ne, aren't we supposed to be looking for Gai-sensei too,” Naruto asked.  
  
“I don't think we have to look for him,” Sakura replied, sounding bored. “Lee-kun was out walking when his crutch got stuck in a pothole. Guess who made a Dynamic Entry to take him to the hospital to get it replaced?”  
  
“Che. Weakling,” Sasuke muttered.  
  
Iruka could feel Kakashi _laughing_ as the jounin shook around him. He rolled his eyes.  
  
“Well, he managed to dodge the first thirty sacks of rice Tsunade-sama threw at him. He got tagged by the next ten though,” Sakura continued. “He did better than Ebisu-sensei in any case. Ebisu-sensei got KO'd by class picture with Iruka-sensei in it.” Iruka felt Kakashi tense. “Konohamaru is almost as tricky as you, Naruto.”  
  
Naruto laughed loudly at that, congratulating himself once again for having taken out the tokubetsu jounin with his Harem no Jutsu. Their footsteps faded away as they walked down the hall towards the door. Just before it closed, Sasuke could be heard muttering a quiet “shameful”.  
  
Kakashi waited tensely for a few moments more before sagging with a heavy sigh of relief. Iruka took the opportunity to elbow him hard before breaking away. He flung the closet door open incautiously and stumbled free from the closet, tripping and falling as he felt a hand clutch at his ankle.  
  
“Kakashi-sensei,” Iruka cried out, kicking at the jounin with his free leg. Kakashi calmly caught hold of that one too, using Iruka's kicking momentum to flip him onto his back. In a flash, Kakashi was sitting on the chuunin's stomach, eye harsh and focused.  
  
“Nice to see you too, Iruka-sensei. Did you see what you did to my _glove_ ,” the jounin purred dangerously, waving his rat-bitten looking glove in front of Iruka's nose. “It was my favorite too.”  
  
Iruka snorted and attempted to bite the article of clothing again. He grinned maliciously as Kakashi yanked it back with a frown. “Just buy another one. The New Years Fukubukuro Sale is tomorrow anyhow.”  
  
“Not a fan of lucky packs,” Kakashi muttered, sounding put out. “Must be the ninja in me.”  
  
“Luck's got only a little to do with it,” Iruka grunted as he tried to take advantage of the jounin's distraction to flip him. Kakashi casually flicked Iruka's nose and shook his head.  
  
“Behave yourself, sensei. Or do we have to make another visit to Tsunade-sama?” He arched his eye happily at that, visibly plotting something. Iruka sighed heavily.  
  
“No.” The chuunin looked at the wall and pouted.  
  
“Good boy.” Kakashi patted Iruka on the head and almost got his fingers bitten for it. He tsked quietly and flipped himself off Iruka's stomach, darting out of strike range with his legendary speed. He scrubbed at the back of his head and looked blankly around. “So... Where do we hide next?”  
  
“We aren't going to _hide_ anymore,” Iruka chided as he stood.  
  
“Well, we _did_ just come out of the closet,” Kakashi mumbled thoughtfully to himself. Iruka flung a dog vest at him.  
  
Despite his protests, Iruka found himself slinking around with Kakashi, jumping at sounds and darting into shadows as people passed. He huffed and shook his wrist, annoyed at how firmly the jounin held it. He was also severely annoyed at himself for having gotten dragged into things yet _again_.  
  
The day had started off well enough. He'd tripped over Naruto who was busy hugging Ukki-san's pot and snoring in front of the doorway, stepped right in a pile of Kakashi's dogs, and fallen into the jounin's arms as he'd come down the hall with a new blanket for the kotatsu. Then his front door had flown open and Gai had burst in, sobbing apologies in between challenging Kakashi and alternatively praising him for his quick wits and skillful evasions and griping about how much better at everything the Copy Nin seemed to be. It had taken a while until Gai's ramblings could be deciphered and Iruka realized he was receiving an apology from Gai for thinking it was possible for him to get pregnant.  
  
He'd shakily tried to calm the overwrought jounin down when Tsunade had thrown open the door and shouted something about “being in the red”. Kotetsu and Izumo had blundered in after, each carrying his wallet and looking pitiful. Well, only Izumo had been carrying his wallet. Kotetsu had been carrying his biggest jar of syrup and looking absolutely crushed.  
  
Madness descended after as Tsunade revealed that she wanted everyone to offer up his or her most valuable possessions to be pawned—sold, she didn't mean to say pawned—so she could balance the books. Iruka hadn't known quite how to explain to her that pawning items within the village wouldn't generate new funds, just recirculate the previously existing debt, but numbers were lost on the Hokage and she'd run roughshod over all of them.  
  
Naruto had woken up with a drooling shout about his superiority over anything and everything when the idea had hit Tsunade like a chidori. It was a horrible, awful, wonderful idea. She decided every shinobi in the village would have to take part in a multi-village athletic competition event. That then led her to declare an immediate and merciless sudden-death game of Tag to test her soldiers' “wit and reflexes”.  
  
“Think of the revenue!” she'd shouted with drunken glee as she'd first starting whipping balls at bone-breaking speed. The stint in the weapons market had been worse as her projectiles had turned both heavy _and_ pointy as she'd snatched random things from stores and begun to fling them at random unsuspecting shinobi. “Think of the village!”  
  
The loud, inebriated, overpowered woman had managed to “tag” everyone in the village except Gai, Kakashi, and Iruka who  found himself being dragged to improbable places with his grey-headed friend as they fled for their lives. All their previous comrades ended up drafted into the hunt and the trio, finding themselves with enemies on all flanks, had split up in hopes of having more success at survival. Of course, Kakashi hadn't released Iruka so the chuunin had been forced to defend _both_ of them as they systematically mowed their way through Konoha at breathtaking speeds.

They'd been running through the Forest of Death with both ANBU and a massive python on their collective tails when Kakashi had teleported them into the hall closet. The poor sculpted monstrosity Ebisu-sensei had gifted Iruka as a souvenir from Rice Country never stood a chance. He had never been sure what to do with the large-busted, massive-penised thing anyhow.  
  
“Let's—” Iruka broke off and yanked back to gain Kakashi's attention. The jounin rounded on him, eye dark with irritation. “Let's just sell all the crap we got and give Tsunade the money so we can end all this insanity,” he continued, firming himself against all coming arguments. Kakashi stared at him steadily, giving nothing away.  
  
“Do you _want_ us to have bad luck, Iruka-sensei,” the jounin asked quietly. “You _know_ how much we'll need it over the year. We must have used up at least a quarter of it just this morning. Tsunade-sama is _tenacious_.”  
  
“We still have all the fortunes you won't let us read yet,” Iruka protested, stumbling as Kakashi took off again. “Fukubukuro! Lucky packs will probably bring us luck too if we sell them! We got so much stuff that it's probably  _bad_ luck to keep it! What am I going to do with  _five_ cradles! I'm not pregnant and I don't have a baby!”  
  
Kakashi paused mid-step and looked back at him curiously. “You don't want to have a baby?”  
  
“How many times do I have to tell you. I _can't_ ,” Iruka stressed.  
  
“Can't or won't,” Kakashi countered.  
  
“ _Can't!_ I'm not a woman, you know!” Iruka slapped at Kakashi's head and missed. Kakashi shrugged at that.  
  
“Does it matter?”  
  
Iruka threw a rock at him.

  
In the end, Iruka had won. They'd slunk back home, avoiding the now-rabid patrol searching for them, snickering as rumors of ANBU gone mad from seeing a horrific sight in the Forest of Death, some swearing celibacy forever, filtered through the streets.  
  
They'd had to get creative with the picking and choosing of items, pulling fortunes from items gotten at temples and tying the fortunes to Shisha-kun's branches, pulling things from cupboards and hiding places, piling mismatched dishes and recently-received children's toys into small mountains, Kakashi surprising Iruka when he kept producing things from his own house at random times to throw in the pile. They had been staring at the mass of odd-sized objects they'd amassed in the living room until Kakashi visibly lit up and pounded his fist into his palm with a surprised “Oh!” and disappeared. Iruka had been frantically struggling to his feet when the jounin had popped back into existence toting bags of storage scrolls.  
  
“Jyan!” Kakashi proudly displayed his collection of nondescript scrolls, each the same size and colour, none looking distinct from the others. “These are perfect!”  
  
“Why do you have all these? You're certifiable,” Iruka muttered, scooping up an armful.  
  
“You are so kind, as always,” Kakashi hummed, poking him on the shoulder. He rubbed his hands with glee. “Now. Let's get separating!”  
  
Kakashi initially separated things by color. He'd formed neat stacks of red cups to go with red bowls, piled with red ribbon and red leaves which Iruka had immediately thrown away. He'd found lucky frog statues in a multitude of colors _somewhere_ and had been happily parsing them out into lots until Iruka had recognized Naruto's illegible scrawled name on the bottom of one and had ordered them put back where they'd come from.  
  
“He won't even miss them! You saw how messy his house was,” Kakashi whined as Iruka steadily cited him yellow cards.  
  
“No.” Iruka was immovable.  
  
Iruka, on the other hand, liked to separate things by pattern. He matched flower-painted lacquer bowls with flower-painted cups and a flower patterned sash. He put frog-patterned fans with frog-patterned chopstick holders. He'd been placing a frog-rattle down next to a frog drum when he realized his things were out of order yet _again_ , sighing with defeat as he realized Kakashi had started to rearrange things by _size_ somewhere in the middle..  
  
“Maybe we should just separate things out by type,” Iruka muttered, pulling a large practice shuriken from a pile of baby toys and glaring at Kakashi.  
  
“Why be predictable,” the jounin asked, trying to take the shuriken back. “It'll ruin my reputation.”  
  
“Because someone could _die_ ,” Iruka barked, slapping at Kakashi's grabby hands. “Stop that!”  
  
Kakashi's clone stole the shuriken and Iruka tackled it, startling as the real Kakashi yanked him back causing them to fall into their semi-neat—not really—piles as they flailed around. Blue mixed with orange, rice bales mixed with koi, big with small, sharp with soft, and in the end, the two of them lay gasping in a rainbow of _things_ , each clutching the other's shirt, unwilling to admit defeat. Pakkun sat in the doorway and rolled his eyes, calling them both massive idiots.  
  
“Okay, surprise it is,” Kakashi managed, grunting as Iruka managed to punch him in the stomach. “Compromise. I like it. Boys!”  
  
Kakashi and Iruka, in their compromise—read, unwillingness to compromise—ended up sorting the items for the lucky packs by having Kakashi's dogs each take a set number of scrolls and to just _catch_ thirteen of each item—because thirteen is lucky—and store them in the scrolls so that neither of them would see what was hidden therein. The dogs found themselves severely tested as slowly tossed items became a barrage as Kakashi and Iruka tried to see which items the other was choosing and tried to match them with the items they thought would best fit. It took Ukki-san flying through the air and Kakashi leaping to catch it before they realized they'd sorted everything and run out of goods for their fukubukuro.  
  
Uuhei and Guruko became messengers and raced through the village spreading news of the super secret guerilla fukubukuro sale being held in the Forest of Death for one hour only—and don't tell the Hokage! Masses of curious shinobi clustered in small groups, whispering madly amongst themselves as the dogs blurred away. Those were Kakashi's dogs! The sneaky jounin hadn't been caught all day! This was their chance! And maybe they could get their hands on some elite Copy Nin swag. A few kunoichi swooned slightly at that thought.  
  
Kakashi and Iruka crouched in the trees keeping an eye on the stack of scrolls next to signs declaring all the rules for the fukubukuro. Nervous shinobi milled around the pile, checking for traps and trying to read the signs.  


Kakashi and Iruka's Happy Fukubukuro Sale!

Irrashai!

  * Rule one: Shinobi buyers only. Items in fukubukuro may be deadly and/or poisonous. We are not responsible for your doom.
  * Rule two: No getting stabby during the bidding/buying process. Fight over who gets what on your own time.
  * Rule three: Don't tell the Hokage. We will all die.
  * Rule four: —Rule four not actually a rule— Iruka-sensei is unable to become pregnant and requests that all rumours about his forthcoming motherhood cease and desist immediately. (henohenomoheji)



  
“Hmm, you know that will only start an entirely new set of rumors,” Kurenai commented, appearing on the branch next to Iruka. He groaned.  
  
“When did he add that? I _told_ him not to add that,” he hissed, imagining a sharp doom upon his friend.  
  
“You'll never win against that one,” Asuma huffed, settling on Iruka's other side and grumbling about chocolate. “He's tricky.”  
  
A bright red puff of smoke popped into existence atop the scroll pile and wafted away to reveal a dour looking Pakkun. He rolled his eyes at the curious shinobi hovering around him and raised a paw.  
  
“Yo, brats. Secret-not-to-be-revealed-to-the-Hokage-upon-pain-of-pranking-fukubukuro-sale starts now,” he deadpanned, disappearing in a green puff of smoke. From somewhere in the crowd, Anko screamed and lunged toward the pile of scrolls and immediately found herself trussed up in a slimy suit of overdone ramen noodles. Pakkun appeared again, this time on Bull's head. “Oh yeah. I forgot. You go through me first.”  
  
Hands appeared around Iruka's face and he barely had time to blink before they clamped over his mouth and he was yanked back. He groaned as Kakashi's voice whispered in his ear as they fell away to the earth and disappeared in a shower of leaves.  
  
“Let's go hide while everyone is distracted again. I hear the closet's particularly nice this time of year.”

**Author's Note:**

> These were originally written for the 12 Days of Christmas Challenge on Livejournal in 2010, starting with the first day of Christmas (December 25). It's basically all crack and I apologise for nothing.
> 
>  **Notes**  
>  Fukubukuro - “lucky packs” are bags or boxes or other “surprise packages” which can be purchased at set prices and are filled with undisclosed items of a total value higher than the packages themselves. Fukubukuro sales tend to occur in the spring and often are first held at New Years and again in March. They can be held anytime otherwise as well. They are also good ways of getting rid of lots.


End file.
